The president may be angry, but we’re hungry, By Ahmed Aminu-Ramatu Yusuf

Nigerians are hungry. However who will inform our President? Who will dare convey such treasonable story to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, particularly when he’s so busy in search of traders for us? Which of his throng of data couriers and propaganda retailers would jeopardise their juicy positions by bearing such info?  Anybody who dares might the truth is be an agent of the opposition.

I respect the Presidency. And worry his powers. Didn’t the African sensible man counsel that we the commoners must be as near the king as a thousand metres and be as far away from him as two thousand metres?

Rely me out of those that will inform the President that the folks he’s presiding over have develop into dust, poor and hungry.

Fairly than interact in such misadventure and be accused of carrying Russian flags, I’ll confine myself to revealing a state secret. The Nationwide Bureau of Statistics has revealed this week that 62.4 per cent of us, or some 140 million Nigerians didn’t have sufficient meals to eat in 2023. The determine is more likely to be greater this 12 months because the scenario has gotten worse.

The disaster of poverty has resulted in the shortcoming of the overwhelming majority of the working folks to make ends meet, handle their conventional tasks to the prolonged household, or to be their neighbour’s keeper.

The reality, which we will solely whisper is sure, we face starvation, the worst  sort in our historical past.  Not even throughout slave commerce or colonialism, throughout within the First and Second World Wars, or our Civil Struggle, had our populace been subjected to this stage of poverty, deprivation or starvation.

Many are merely unable to feed themselves and their households. We’re struggling and in ache. All these are significantly revolting our physique chemistry.

Skyrocketing inflation, particularly within the costs of foodstuff and drugs, have rendered our revenue extraordinarily inadequate, making them nearly irrelevant. Marriages are more and more coming beneath pressure, and a few are breaking down. Kids are pressured by starvation to work for their very own survival.

Others have develop into like skilled beggars. Youths are delaying marriage. Suicide charges are growing as by no means earlier than. Persons are simply dying earlier than their “time” as a consequence of wahala (issues), particularly starvation.

The World Financial institution (WB), one of many forefront drivers of Nigeria’s multidimensional poverty, revealed that over 129 million Nigerians now stay under the nationwide poverty line.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (PMB) might in any case not be unaware of our dilemma. This I assume is why he and his group are pleading with the folks to bear any financial suffocation and starvation within the curiosity of  democracy and tomorrow’s prosperity.

However how can a person, a Nigerian for that matter, inform his spouse and kids to tolerate starvation for democracy and tomorrow’s greatness? If the spouse understands, undoubtedly the kids is not going to.

For these in energy, on the Federal, State and Native ranges, on the civil and customary ranges, within the govt and legislature, in elected and appointed positions, allow them to know no person has efficiently preached tolerance and persistence to the hungry. Starvation is aware of no intercourse, ethnicity, faith, or ism. It is aware of not, and respects no, geopolitical divide. It humbles the non secular, the bravest and the strictest.

However to be truthful to President Tinubu, starvation has been a part of our historical past. In his e-book, Silent Violence: Meals, Famine & Peasantry in Northern Nigeria, Michael Watts gave an in depth account and evaluation of starvation throughout World Struggle II, significantly in Hausa land. The Talakawa or commoners known as the starvation of the period as: “Baban Yunwa” (Nice Starvation), which they attributed to “akin mutum” – because the handiwork of (authorities) folks.

Simply as at this time’s starvation is compounded by exterior forces just like the Worldwide Financial Fund (IMF) and World Financial institution (WB) – in collaboration with their Nigerian allies, so was the Nice Starvation of the Nineteen Forties attributable to the British imperialist forces working hand-in-hand with the standard rulers.

The Nice Starvation was triggered by authorities’s struggle time insurance policies of extreme improve in taxation and tariffs, obligatory manufacturing of export crops, forceful conscription of individuals into military and mines, and compulsory grains requisitioning.

Immediately’s starvation is triggered by the IMF-WB dictated insurance policies, applied by this not too reflective administration. Insurance policies which included extreme improve in petroleum product costs, excessive improve in electrical energy tariffs, unwarranted will increase in taxation, enormous devaluation of the naira, and the refusal to make wage and wage will increase to correspond with the price of residing.

Simply because the Nice Starvation deepened the antagonism between the state and society, so does at this time’s starvation. However whereas the civil society teams within the Nineteen Forties have been nicely organised, vibrant, important and supported by the nationalist politicians, the reverse is the case at this time. Moreover, liberal democracy flourished and flowered from the late Nineteen Forties to January 15,1966, when the degenerate navy adventurists started to starve and empty it of its content material.

All the main political events at this time are fixated on energy not the folks. They focus on primitive accumulation and monopolistic acquisition, not in democracy and growth.

Yesterday, political events supplied the populace alternate options. Immediately, there are none as all the main events are neoliberal-driven and anti-people. That is the issue. However the issue is an enormous problem. It’s a disaster.

Disaster is a important state; a turning level; an important and decisive second; a tough and misery interval; a interval in-between life and demise; an period in-between of decomposition and regeneration. Which is why the German-American sociologist, financial historian and Latin Americanist, Andrea Gunder Frank, argued that disaster: “is a decisive turning level, crammed with hazard and nervousness, probably that means life or demise for a diseased individual, a social system or historic course of. The result have to essentially be demise however, might be a brand new life, if in our case the financial, social and political physique is ready to undertake and to endure a regenerative transformation in the course of the disaster.”

If the starvation of the Nineteen Forties and the struggles towards it’s something to go by, it means civil society teams should organise towards poverty and starvation. It implies that the current race of politicians can’t be relied upon, as their agenda is energy, not the folks; and in primitive accumulation and monopolistic acquisition.

The scenario within the nation doesn’t name for lamentation, slightly, it calls for motion, or what the anti-colonialist nationalists used to name ‘Optimistic Motion.’ That was additionally what Fela Anikulapo-Kuti meant in his ‘Military Association’ album when he sang: “My situation don attain make I act.”

Due to this fact, in the identical approach the Nice Starvation of the Nineteen Forties contributed immensely in paving the best way for the attainment of the primary independence, so at this time’s starvation is crying for the emergence of a Second Independence Motion (SIM), which can usher in a brand new Nigeria constructed on human rights, equality of all ethnic nationalities and non secular teams, democracy, growth, and a simply federal system.

Historical past and posterity have assigned this activity of ushering a Second Independence Motion, and attaining the Second Independence on to the labour, skilled, dealer, farmer, scholar and  youth  actions, and different forces dedicated to emancipatory politics. If we’re united, we will by no means be defeated.

Ahmed Aminu-Ramatu Yusuf labored as deputy director, Cupboard Affairs Workplace, The Presidency, and retired as Common Supervisor (Administration), Nigerian Meteorological Company, (NiMet). E-mail: aaramatuyusuf@yahoo.com